Bewitched

Christine O’Donnell

In Britain in 1963, when a by-election was held to choose a replacement for John Profumo, the disgraced Secretary of State for War, who had been obliged to resign over his relations with a call girl, one of the candidates was a young man named David Sutch. Sutch’s platform, such as it was, included lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, presumably on the ground that teen-agers were no less responsible than adults, and the dismal number of votes he received, two hundred and nine, might have discouraged any further pursuit of office. But Sutch—who was better known as the rock musician Screaming Lord Sutch—went on to have one of the longest careers in British politics, as the head of what eventually became known as the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which serves in the U.K. as a kind of institutional satirical protest movement. Sutch ran for office forty-odd times, always in high-profile seats, always without success, and always with substantial publicity. (His biggest victory came in 1990, when he outpolled the candidate from the Social Democratic Party, which for almost a decade had been attempting to provide an alternative to the Labour and Conservative Parties. The S.D.P. folded shortly thereafter.) Sutch died in 1999, but his legacy continues: in this year’s British election, the Party fielded twenty-seven candidates, including one who promised to stick juvenile delinquents together with Super Glue and one who campaigned on an anti-gravity platform.

The recent primary elections in this country have brought to the public’s attention several candidates who also appear to be running on anti-gravity platforms, most notably Christine O’Donnell, who, with the backing of the Tea Party, won Delaware’s Republican senatorial primary, defeating Mike Castle, the establishment candidate, in an upset. O’Donnell, who is forty-one, and is formidably telegenic in a Palinesque mold—she has been known to wear her chestnut hair in a modified beehive—has a past so colorful that it might make even a sixties rock musician blush. She was an evangelical activist in the nineteen-nineties, when she founded a youth organization called the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, under whose auspices she argued in favor of saving sex for marriage, and against sex that does not require a partner. O’Donnell also proved herself game for the pseudo-conflict with which cable television and talk radio fill their empty hours. She was a frequent guest on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect,” telling him on one now notorious occasion that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and had concluded a date with a “picnic on a satanic altar.”

Last week, O’Donnell was on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, downplaying the dabblings by calling such activities “teen-age rebellion,” and asking, “Who doesn’t regret the eighties to some extent?” (Quite right: think of that hair, those clothes, that President.) She also defended herself against charges of financial irresponsibility, including her default on a mortgage in 2008. She had fallen behind in her payments, she explained, as the result of devoting too much time to a pro-bono public-relations client, a disabled woman whose feeding tube was to be removed by a court order. “When her father came to me, he said, ‘I can’t pay you, but will you help me save her life?’ and you can’t say no to that,” she added.

In the interview, O’Donnell criticized her opponents for attacking her personally, rather than for challenging her on her political beliefs, which would be a fair complaint were it not for the fact that she has built a career on suggesting how others should live their lives: in the nineties, as a spokesperson for a conservative-values group called Concerned Women for America, she sent out press releases condemning the “unhealthy life style” of homosexuals, and describing AIDS education as “a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents.” She suggested that her critics should focus instead on the flush hand of G.O.P. positions she holds: extending the Bush tax cuts, with a view to making them permanent; granting a two-year holiday on the capital-gains tax; eliminating the estate tax; repealing health-care reform.

O’Donnell’s fellow primary winners this season include, in Nevada, Harry Reid’s opponent, Sharron Angle, who is in favor of eliminating the Department of Education and the Department of Energy; Joe Miller, the G.O.P. senatorial candidate in Alaska, who would outlaw abortion even in the case of rape or incest; and Carl Paladino, the businessman running for the governorship of New York, who is best known for forwarding off-color e-mails, and who would use eminent domain to prevent the construction of an Islamic community center—the so-called Ground Zero mosque. The insurgence of these protest candidates is understandable, up to a point, given the parlous state of the economy and the failure of the Democrats (and, for that matter, the establishment Republicans) to assure the public that they have matters in hand: in August, twenty-one states reported a rise in unemployment, and the number of houses repossessed by banks was up twenty-five per cent over last year. (O’Donnell would have had no trouble finding an audience sympathetic to her mortgage problems.) Meanwhile, A Pledge to America, which the House Republicans released last week, is essentially a retread of the 1994 Contract with America, and seems unlikely to calm many nerves.

But there are indications that the Administration is finally making an effort to respond to the discontent. Last week, in a televised town-hall meeting, Velma Hart, a middle-class veteran and Obama supporter, told the President of her fear of returning to “the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives.” Obama acknowledged Hart’s frustration, and went on to cite the various measures that his government has enacted—student-loan, credit-card, and health-care reform—to help ease the burdens of people like her. Later in the meeting, the President also noted that the Tea Party arose from a noble American tradition of skepticism about government. “That’s in our D.N.A., right?” he said, to applause. “I mean, we came in because the folks over on the other side of the Atlantic had been oppressing folks without giving them representation.” Skepticism about government is indeed an essential element of democracies, as Screaming Lord Sutch demonstrated. But the Administration still has to make a more persuasive case that anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party sort must be met with an equal skepticism—that to take such protest and turn it into policy would be nothing less than loony. ♦